In this post, Pilar shares her personal learnings on turning live events into podcast episodes. She also provides guidance when planning for your next ‘podcast ready’ event.
Turning the recording of a live event into a podcast may seem straightforward, and it can be, but other times you’ll need to dedicate a lot of time and energy to make sure an event is “podcast ready “.
If your event consists of a panel discussion, or an interview with a couple of guests, creating an episode from your recording might not take you long.
But if you have designed your event to be highly participative and to help the “audience” feel like an integral part, your recording might end up with 10 voices in the mix, rather than just yours and your guests’. Factors like these make things more complicated and I recently experienced this firsthand while putting together the September episode of Facilitation Stories.
On the 7 July 2021 I hosted an online meetup for the England and Wales chapter of the IAF. The conversation centred around the recent book The Power of Facilitation and was a panel discussion involving three of its co-authors.
We held the event via Zoom, with the conversation switching from author, to audience, to author, comments from another author, from the audience… you get the picture. Even though I knew we’d be turning the audio into an episode, and there would be lots of editing to be done, I wasn’t expecting to end up with an 8 hour editing session.
Luckily, I was interested in all the people participating so listening to them was a pleasure. Plus, editing gave me the chance to absorb the content as I listened back –let’s face it, when I’m chairing a discussion or facilitating a conversation, I can only take in so much that’s being said. My mind is in too many places at once.
Zoom is my preferred platform for live events because it is ideal if you want everyone to be equally present online. (There are other platforms more suited to the one-to-many type of broadcast, but not for events that require community feel.) And Zoom is great for that, but the platform wasn’t built to record podcasts, so there are things we need to be aware of.
Challenges when using Zoom to record a panel discussion
1) Not all tracks are created equal
For starters, make sure you’ve set Zoom to split the tracks of your recording. This means that each guest’s voice will be recorded on a track that only has their sound. This prevents someone’s background noise or cough from spoiling somebody else’s intervention.
BUT (and it’s a big one), on Zoom, if someone is muted for a while, their silence is not recorded and they end up with an unusually short track. For example, if ten minutes into the event, Martin asks one question lasting one minute, and then doesn’t speak for the rest of the event which lasts one hour, I would expect Martin’s audio file to be an hour long, with his audio at 10:00mins. But what I would get from Zoom would be a one minute file, only with his question. (See figure 1)
This means that aligning everyone’s tracks is far from straightforward.
In addition to this, you need to be aware that if a speaker drops off halfway through the call, the recording resets and you end up with more than one audio file for that person.
One way to work around this would be to ask people not to mute themselves, but then you end up having to silence all the tracks while you’re editing. In this instance, you choose which pain to bear.
2) Different guests have different audio quality
In this kind of event, it’s likely that every person’s audio will sound different. Some will have smooth internet connections (great!), some will have background noise in the distance (not so great), others will have proper microphones (not many, let’s face it), others will be using wireless Bluetooth pods which produce a very tinny sound, but are great for getting rid of the background noise.
Even though Zoom, and other apps, filter background noise at the point of recording you’ll still have to smooth out the difference in quality and volume when you edit the episode. Even if you end up running the episode through an AI post-production app (like Auphonic), it’s worth tweaking it at the editing stage.
Talking of sound quality: Whenever I use Zoom for a recording (because I already have a subscription and most people are now familiar with it) I make a local recording of my track on Audacity. It’s another little piece to add to the mix, but it means that even if your guests sound like they’re on Zoom, at least the host of the show sounds like they’re recording for a podcast.
Unfortunately, I forgot to do it for this particular episode!
But that’s okay, I was only there as a connecting voice.
While editing, I noticed how disconnected live speech can be, as opposed to when we are deliberately creating a recording, focusing solely on what we say into the microphone. In a live event we are conscious of others, listening to what they’re saying, their reactions etc.
As a result I noticed a lot more “erms”, “you know”s, and thoughts that pivoted halfway through a sentence. While most of these will go unnoticed during a live event, where people can see the speaker, they will need to be edited for the audio-only podcast listener.
3) Transferring a live tone to a recording doesn’t always work
Listening back to the recording, I also noticed that as host of the event I must’ve felt responsible for the group’s energy (or I was quite nervous), because I noticed that at the beginning, my energy was high, and my speech was fast. While this is fine for a live event, it didn’t translate that well to an episode.
Recommendations
Having gone through the pain of putting this episode together myself (I’m exaggerating, it wasn’t that painful, but you know what I mean), you can benefit from my learnings and work towards having a smooth experience.
- If you have lots of tiny contributions from more than three people, and their audio is not wildly different, put them all in one track in Audacity, or other editing programme. Also, place the file with the full recording at the top of your editing pane, so that you can use it as reference.
- A couple of times, a panellist dropped off in the middle of their intervention. Instead of removing that bit completely or keeping the whole dialogue of “is he there? Have we lost him? Is it just me or have they frozen?”, I kept the first of those remarks, which explained they had dropped off and then used music to segue into the next question.
- Address the future podcast listener during the event to remind them that they’re listening to a live discussion – it will explain the dodgy audio quality.
- Finally, before you export the final file, visually check the tracks. Make sure nothing has come out of alignment when moving bits and pieces around. (This is good practice for all podcast editing.) I usually also listen to all the transitions between the different bits of audio, to make sure they’re smooth.
Was it worth it? Yes, it was!
It has given the live event a much longer life and has provided variety in our programme. I hope my own experience helps you as you continue experimenting with format during your own podcasting adventures.
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